


Fading Summer

by daredevilmoon



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Epistolary excerpts, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 18:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1951743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daredevilmoon/pseuds/daredevilmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They write and don't quite fall out of love.</p><p>
  <i>He revelled in both the hazed visions and the planted words which blossomed after settling their roots in him.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fading Summer

The summer air began to twist around an autumnal chill as one season faded into the next, the sky growing ever more eternally grey and the misting rain that much more unpleasant. Summer had held the sweetness of a love affair, the anticipation as heated as the sweltering city in pressing itself over Philip’s skin. Now, with the coming of autumn, the anticipation burned less brightly, though burn it did, as Thomas’s letters drifted like leaves down the countryside into Philip’s hands.

Each letter held different shades - of love or lust, intrigue or intolerable boredom - which coalesced into an Impressionistic dappling of Thomas’s life. Each, their own pleasure in the reading, a particular feeling belonging only to one, and Philip absently committed lines to memory as he took in the writing, ever so precise in its execution.

_I sometimes wonder at how many letters of yours I could recite like the verse I learned at school. Your letters have, at the least, the dignity of having been preserved rather more keenly than the books from which I studied. (Though I will, only slightly shame-faced, admit to more than one having met slightly melancholic scotch with unfortunate vigour on both their parts; even your letters have an insatiable thirst.)_

His recently gathered words, he would allow his thoughts to caress as he found himself otherwise occupied: a litany of of obscenity inking his visions of debutantes who wore their hair in styles best suiting a hopeful coronet. A charming smile, drawn up to his mouth from history, graced his features as he watched feminine fingers coyly stretched in search of rings. Oh, he thought, with a sort of vicious glee, if only you knew of whose hands I dream.

An ironic enthusiasm consumed him and he played the game he was meant to with more apparent zeal than before; if play he must, he found it all the more enjoyable to do so with a lover’s words fresh in his blood. It provided a more tangible separation between himself and the women, allowing as it did the blissful escape to a reality to which they would never find themselves privy.

 Philip wrote, too, of these private amusements, knowing that they would give Thomas the thrill less of having Philip himself so much as a duke at his whims. Though Philip thought of himself as possessing other draws than his title, he wasn’t fool enough to believe that he was sought after for much other than the extension of his position. Yet sought after he was, all the same, and for all of the dinners and luncheons, for the endless blur of women, he remained unfettered by any ties but those he had willingly woven through his veins with ink.

_I dined this evening with a lady whom I have often heard praised for her beauty, though I found her rather lacking. Hair too pale, skin too dark, but her lips were quite the same shade as yours. All I could think of the evening long was the wicked things I have seen your mouth do, which gave me quite the flush. I’m sure the party entire thought I was tight. In my way, I was. Even the thought of you dizzies - I can hardly imagine the intoxication of finding your flesh once more._

The letters Philip received were invariably shorter than his own, but would arrive in far quicker succession. At the reception of one, often something innocuous or slightly risqué for gossip alone, Philip would pen a reply and keep it, tucked neatly away in his desk, until the letter’s inevitable successor arrived.

While the first letter was more that of a friend, the second was always that of a lover; it was curiously as though Thomas forgot the allowances of their correspondence until he had lost the first letter to the post, though Philip did wonder whether Thomas knowingly declared such a break between the two things. As for himself, he saw no point in it - indeed, thought the letters sweeter when the threads coloured heart’s blood were stitched into life’s tapestries.

_Write to me of some dream or another, so that I may imagine your voice enchanting me from sleep when I wake Thursday next.  I feared there should be some sort of minor revolt with most unpleasant repercussions if I didn’t find my way to the country soon. I think I shall need the strength of your character atop my own to manage intact. Months on end - how shall I manage? London has its share of amusements, but I believe I shall be left only the thoughts of you in my arms once I arrive at Crowborough. I would so like if you would provide me new fantasies to draw me away. My own mind can think of just so much and I should much prefer it to be filled with your words rather than my own for a time._

They each acquiesced to the other’s wants, sketching out more or less elaborate scenes, those shared or those secreted away in fantasy. Lust was always met half-way with love and those, really,  were the things Philip took away and replaced from himself. Thomas’s words could never be his body, the image of which still played so clearly in Philip's thoughts, but they were Thomas's mind; perhaps, too, his heart.

While the correspondence was certainly no better pleasure than their meetings, they were their own joy all the same. Philip read the letters with the reverence befitting pieces of history, for what were they but his own? Every page was a sort of permanence, a sort of proof - ink lasting longer than words lost to air, longer than seed lost to mouths or cloth. He would begrudge the beauty of no aspect of what were, what they had ever been, and revelled in both the hazed visions and the planted words which blossomed after settling their roots in him.

_I think on you, always. I spoke before of the heaven of our love and I still believe nothing less to be true. Only the brittle-veined whose hearts could never carry the weight of love could ever say otherwise. Perhaps that is the trouble with England: its climes provoke a slowing of the blood, a reticence to feel for the chill. There is in her veins of rivers nothing but the cold and love does run hot. I scarcely dare think of our outcome should we have met in the sunshine. Then, of course, I do think of such things and lose myself to daydreams still not so sweet as our days._


End file.
